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Ads on Twitter look just like a tweet.

Let's be clear on something. There will be ads. I get that and most people who have grown up enjoying freely provided radio and television programming get that, never mind that the internet has largely been a trad of advertising in exchange for free things. I'm quite certain Facebook will run ads as long as there's a Facebook on which to run them and have even defended (sarcastically, I might add) the logic in doing so. But those full-screen mobile ads are just a flat-out terrible experience.

Just the other day, Robert Scoble, Silicon Valley startup guru, wrote a piece about the exciting future of Facebook. He included this tidbit: "Facebook has to pick, out of millions of potential messages, only about 30 for us each to see, each time we refresh the page (or, better yet, drag down on the mobile app)." So of all the things your friends share -- links to news, cat videos, updates about their kids, photos of sunsets, what they're listening to on Spotify -- you're only going to get about 30 bits of information. A serious set of choices have to be made, to be sure.

The other day, Facebook decided the most important thing was to spend an entire screen telling me about American Express. A few days earlier it was Samsung's mobile phones which, while attractive, aren't too exciting given that I just bought a new phone and am under contract. This illustrates in microcosm a really big problem. Some kind of advertising is going to appear alongside our Facebook feeds on mobile; does it have to also be so intrusive and dull?

But when you consider that Twitter's forays into advertising are newer than Facebook's and that Twitter has only about one-third as many active users, the differential doesn't look as bad. Consider also that Facebook has orders of magnitude more information about its users than Twitter and you can begin to imagine that Facebook ought to be able to charge more.

So why then is Facebook so aggressively going out of its way to make the mobile experience worse? And before we write this off as anomalous, consider this is hardly the only example.

The company has in trials a new plan to basically let people spam you with Facebook messages for $1. While the service is well-intentioned -- it allows people to reach out to folks who aren't "friends" with and try to make contact without getting sent to the "other" tab, the equivalent of Facebook oblivion -- it's part of the creeping move away from open social network to pay-to-play network....

... which makes it similar to the "promoted posts" feature, that allows regular people to get the treatment of advertisers. Because your friends have a lot of things that might appear in their feed, your updates often get missed, so much so that only about 12 percent of your friends will see a given one. This is basically $7 to say, "Hey, this thing I'm talking about matters more than all the other stuff I'm talking about" and to make sure your friends see it in their feed.

Rumors are strong that Facebook intends to bring video ads to your news feed in the first half of 2013. If all goes according to plan, these ads will begin playing automatically, even on your smartphone.